


No Matter What

by Aja



Category: Draft Day (2014)
Genre: Gen, Harassment, M/M, Misogyny, NFL, Pregnancy, Sexism, Sports, Workplace Relationship, friendships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 14:34:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13055961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: Ali has a crisis of faith. Sonny and Vontae are there to help her through it.





	No Matter What

**Author's Note:**

  * For [salable_mystic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/salable_mystic/gifts).



> Thanks for the awesome prompt, salable_mystic! I hope you enjoy! Happy Yuletide. :)

After Ali finally figured out what she needed to do, it was so obvious in retrospect that she spent a few weeks being baffled and bewildered at herself for not realizing it before. It was so crystal clear, so glaringly obvious.

After she fretted about this for a few days, Sonny sat her down, leathery hand warm in hers, and said decisively that she needed to stop beating herself up so much.

“Look,” he said. “You didn’t notice because you got used to doing the emotional labor for everyone at corporate. Including me. Including Coach Penn, my dad, the temp staff, everyone.”

“Emotional labor,” she said, trying not to smirk because he was obviously trying really hard to be sincere and not to wince at how unmanly all this sounded. “Is that a concept you learned from the Baby Book?”

Sonny narrowed his eyes at her, totally on to her, of course. “Please, it’s 2014,” he said, totally unfazed. “It’s a concept I learned from Twitter.”

“You have never been on Twitter a day in your life.”

“All right, all right, fine. I learned it from the Baby Book.”

The Baby Book was a hilariously new agey guide for new parents that purported to combine traditional parenting tips with KonMari. Vontae had given it to them both at the baby shower, and — maybe this was a recurring theme with her, huh — Ali had initially laughed, thinking he meant it as a joke, until she’d seen how earnest and excited he was about it.

So then she had to pretend to like the Baby Book for Vontae, because he asked her about it every time he saw her after that.

And Sonny started out pretending to like the Baby Book, but then he actually got really into the Baby Book. So then he started intermittently spending nights whispering instructions to her stomach to let go of all its worldly possessions and focus only on the things that brought it the most joy.

“I’m pretty sure the only thing bringing it joy at this point is amniotic fluid and the guacamole we had for dinner,” was the kind of response she usually made to this nonsense.

“Shhh,” Sonny said to the creature whose heart was pumping merrily away inside of her, as though it were actually something mystical and magical and not the first act of an alien bodysnatcher directed by David Cronenberg. “Your mom is just being ironic right now because she hasn’t yet learned to let go of cynicism. But she’ll get there.”

It was _probably_ not the first act of a horror film. Probably.

 

 

Anyway, before she figured out what to do, she was still performing emotional labor for everybody in corporate, because Sonny, of course, had been right about that. One day in particular she’d resorted to carrying out odd jobs that the office intern had been rendered unable to do. This was because once again Sonny had accidentally terrorized them by demanding to know what a Reddit was and why it was currently harassing all the wives and girlfriends of the Browns’ offensive linemen on social media.

He hadn’t liked the answer — or more accurately hadn’t been able to _believe_ the answer, which was that r/browns had arbitrarily decided that a certain controversial fourth-quarter play was unmanly, and consequently all those women needed to be asked, persistently, what it was like to sleep with a bunch of pussies every night.

“That doesn’t make any goddamn sense,” Sonny had snapped at the terrified intern, who’d winced and smartly clutched their laptop a little tighter. “Whatever happened to just booing the players?”

“I believe social media renders certain forms of harassment further-reaching and more effective, sir,” quivered the intern. “Especially in a post-Gamergate internet.”

Sonny stared uncomprehendingly.

“Sorry, sir,” added the intern, right before Sonny declared vaguely that the internet was full of sons of bitches and tried to throw his coffee cup at his own laptop. It missed, and thankfully it was mostly empty, but it had splashed over his desk and over the intern, who yelped and ran away.

Ali followed, soothed the intern, and gave them cash to go buy a new pair of khakis. The intern responded with a grateful hug, which left Ali feeling awkward, despite her awareness that she’d wind up doing intern work herself if she went a step further.

“He just gets emotionally invested,” she ventured, and the intern sniffled and nodded vigorously.

Well, damn. Fine. “You know what,” she added, “just take a half day.”

Right, then. Intern duty it was. She went into her office to change out of her stilettos into her Skechers — the primary luxury she allowed herself whenever Sonny managed to scream himself out of his underpaid labor and into having his girlfriend put her fancy exec job on hold to run his errands.

“How do we make them stop?” Sonny snapped at her when she strode into his office. He still sounded exasperated, but there was a note of penitence in his voice. Good.

“You don’t, Sonny, it’s the internet,” Ali said. “You just have to ride it out. They have to ride it out.”

“Bullshit,” Sonny declared. “Go down to the clubhouse for me, find out who’s being targeted and what the worst of it is. We’re the goddamn Cleveland Browns, if our players’ families are being harassed we call the goddamn police.”

“Penn won’t like that,” Ali reminded him. Sonny scowled inadvertently, the way he tended to do when he’d forgotten Penn’s existence and then been abruptly reminded of it again. Ali couldn’t help it; she reached out to ruffle his hair. He smiled and caught her hand, and she suddenly saw them in a freeze-frame, like the rest of the office might be seeing them: he in his jeans and day-old scruff, nearly two decades older than her, she in a mini-skirt and tennis shoes, the starry-eyed fan who’d battled her way past endless rounds of lechers and late nights to get into this boys’ club and who now probably seemed starry-eyed in a whole different way.

So, they were odd. But they each liked odd. She thought of that note Sonny had written to himself on draft day last year. She wondered if, at any point, he’d written a similar note to himself about her — and then she smiled back and pulled him in by his belt loops for a kiss, because of course he fucking had. He wrote that note to himself every day. She could see it. That’s why she was going through with this whole weird wacky baby thing.

Or at least that’s what she thought until she actually went down to the clubhouse.

“Oh, look who it is,” Penn greeted her. “Sonny send you to ride my ass or am I just getting off with a little light pegging?”

“I’m actually not here for you,” she told him, plastering on the polite grimace in place of a real smile. Men like Penn usually didn’t notice the difference. As predicted, Penn was less than pleased about having his practice disrupted because his players were acting like crybabies over a little online trolling, but when she took him aside and showed him some of the more vile tweets she’d pulled up on her way down from the office, he made a face and shut up, which was for Penn practically the equivalent of acing sensitivity training.

An hour later, armed with a list of social media handles and more creative uses of the c-word than she had hitherto known existed, she sat back, exhausted and a little shaken. She’d parked herself and her laptop in a small conference room to talk to the players one by one; she was grateful for the privacy it afforded her now.

“Fuck,” she said, and then, “ _Fuck_ ,” again.

A tap on the door; she looked up to see Vontae standing uncertainly in the doorway.

“I just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” he said. “Those posts were a lot to handle all at once.”

She smiled up at him, infinitely grateful for him — _Vontae Mack, no matter what_ , and thank _god_ for that — and stretched out her hand. He took it and squeezed, and she suddenly realized she was crying.

It wasn’t a big deal — pregnancy, hormones, swollen feet, she cried out of nowhere sometimes, it was fine — except that she suddenly felt totally overwhelmed, exhausted in a way she had no idea how to grapple with.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” she said, and suddenly she was crying for real, heaving, gulping sobs that brought him all the way into the room, softly shutting the door and lowering the blinds — seriously, thank god — and wrapping his arms around her, hugging her gently and letting her sob through it.

“How do you raise your nephews?” she asked him through her choked-off gasps, trying to get a handle on the welling panic that had arisen inside of her. She hated this, hated that a bunch of losers from 4chan or wherever could get this kind of reaction out of her after less than an hour of reading their loser tweets dripping with misogyny and transphobia, their boring, uncreative instagram memes of players with crudely drawn pink vaginas over their uniforms. “How do you keep them from turning into monsters? They just, they, they swallow everything. What if they swallow us?”

That probably didn’t make any sense, but Vontae was still hugging her, nodding like he understood what she meant. “I don’t know,” he said with a broken little laugh. “I worry every day about my nephews. If I ever have a little girl I don’t know what I’d do. Keep her in the house til she’s 18, I guess.”

“No, see, no, that’s part of it, you’re joking, but it’s so _easy_ to just — jesus, what if our kid’s trans or genderqueer?” Ali pulled away long enough to reach for the tissue stash she’d started keeping on hand for emergency cry sessions. “We talked about this so much when we decided we didn’t want to know in advance, because we didn’t want to put all our bullshit parental assumptions about gender onto our kid. But I don’t know — this is a whole other kind of bullshit I don’t know how to deal with. How do you prepare boys to live in a world that wants to turn them into rapists? How do you prepare girls for a world that tears them down and dehumanizes them? How do you prepare a nonbinary kid, or a queer kid, for a world that’s still debating whether or not they even exist?” She blew her nose loudly, then burbled, “Jesus, I’m so sorry, I’m babbling at you and I’m _so_ sorry—”

“Hey, no, no, are you kidding?” Vontae pressed her hand again. “You don’t ever apologize. Listen. You and Sonny are family, you know that, right? That day back in May — that moment he called my name, I was sitting on my couch back home, and the first thing I thought in the middle of all that shock, was, _thank god I get to be with family_.”

“Bullshit,” Ali said feelingly, laughing anyway.

“No, I’m serious,” said Vontae. “Sonny was the real deal, you know?” He grinned. “What am I even saying, I know you know.”

She grinned back, sobs finally subsiding. “Yeah, I know. Sometimes probably too real.”

“Well. Yeah.” Vontae laughed. “But that’s Sonny. You know what you get with him.”

She laughed outright at that. “Whether you always want it or not.”

“But that’s the thing about Sonny,” Vontae said. “He’s honest even when he’s wrong. I think that’s the only thing you can do — be honest, I mean. Be honest with him and yourself about how fucked up everything is. And your kid. It’s a scary, mean world, but if you raise your kid in love and compassion, you gotta trust that they’ll be loving and compassionate.”

She took a deep breath. “Yeah.” Okay. Less panicked, now. Less convinced Gamergate was going to come for her unborn fetus waving doxes and pitchforks. That was improvement. She pushed back her chair, ready to pitch herself unevenly to her feet.

“And equal,” Vontae added.

She paused in mid-upward heave. “What?”

Vontae shrugged. “I mean. They gotta see you in a position of respect. They gotta see you and Sonny as equals. That’s one thing my grandma and my mom and my aunts always taught me about women. If kids grow up seeing women be disrespected, they get all these mixed signals about how to treat girls and how they’re supposed to act, no matter what gender they are. My mom always told me: Vontae, you gotta get in there early, make sure you level the playing field for _yourself_ , so when your kids come along after you, they know that’s how it’s supposed to be. So they won’t accept anything less.”

Ali looked at him. His stats had been impressive when he’d arrived, but since then he’d been working relentlessly to improve himself. And he had. He’d been leveling the playing field his whole life. He was amazing at it.

She flashed back to that picture in her head — the two of them, her and Sonny, frozen in his office, silhouettes looking lovingly at each other.

And just like that, like lightning, she knew what she had to do.

  
  
  


It took her two days to prep before making her speech, and then, when she was ready as she’d ever be, she called a meeting with Sonny and Tony and made her pitch.

Molina squinted at her. “What is this?” he muttered. “Is this because the two of you are fucking?”

“Hey,” said Sonny.

“No,” said Ali, because honestly, it _wasn’t_. “It’s because I’ve handled the financials for this team for the last six years, I have kept us in the black, I’ve guaranteed all our player salaries without ever coming in over budget and without entering into extended salary disputes, and although I’m _really good at my job_ , there’s currently no upward mobility for me. I’m stagnating in my current position. And because I’m still seen as drastically subordinate to Sonny, my position is perpetually undermined here."

"So you're proposing I, what, exactly?"

"Make me assistant GM," Ali started to say, just as Sonny said: 

"Demote me."

She blinked. They both stared at him.

"No, seriously," said Sonny. "Demote me. Make me assistant manager. Ali's right, she runs this team on a day-to-day basis while I mainly scout and dick around with recruitment. Put her in charge of the clubhouse. Make her GM. That should shut Penn up once and for all."

Molina looked between them. "The fuck," he said. "Would you honestly be asking for this if you weren't fucking her? Do you even know what you're saying?"

Sonny just looked at Ali, smiling, completely confident, and said, "Absolutely," and there — there it was. She saw it, plain and brilliant on his face:

_Ali, no matter what._


End file.
